


Now Nothing

by AMarguerite



Category: Persuasion - Jane Austen
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 12:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22739173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: Quick, angsty ficlet for rainsleetsnow, for the prompt "Anne/Wentworth, knowing each other well."
Relationships: Anne Elliot/Frederick Wentworth
Comments: 28
Kudos: 177





	Now Nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rain_sleet_snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/gifts).

They must now be as strangers to each other, but how, thought Anne, could that ever be so? Each time she saw him, she was struck with some familiarity, some sign of continuation of the Frederick Wentworth then under construction, being fashioned with a seaman’s care and precision from commander to captain. 

In the halcyon days of their engagement, before her father had returned from a house party and disappointed Anne yet again for failing to see all that was good instead of all that was gilded, there had been no detail too insignificant to know and wonder at. Anne had considered it blazon poetry: to catalogue the wondrous parts that made up the whole, of assigning each strong limb, each bright eye, each warm laugh their place in jewel cases, in constellations, in the flower gardens of royal palaces. Frederick-- Captain Wentworth, she now reminded herself-- had been unfamiliar with that form of poetry, though he had been eager to learn. Indeed, he had loved to read them to her of an evening, his rich low voice breathing life and sweetness each word as he pulled them off the page and released them in the air, to fly to her ear. But: blazon had not been his metaphor. Captain Wentworth had jokingly referred to the poems as a ship’s manifest or a muster book. She had not known what either of those were, and he had laughed but been kind, and opened the door into his world as eagerly as she had opened the door of poetry into hers. 

How could the list of all his virtues endure after eight years of silence? She had attempted to forget; she had forced herself to think of him-- and yet she thought of nothing else when he was near. 

He still had the manly upright posture she had so admired; the habit of holding his hands linked behind him, naval-style. The curl of his handsome mouth, the second before he smiled, was still there. She saw it less often, to be sure, and it was sharper, without that softness that had so captivated, and that had once belonged to her. When he removed his gloves, when he reached for a newspaper or held out his cup to be refilled, her eye fell still, on the faint scar on the back of his left hand, a dim ghost of an injury incurred when turning aside an enemy sword in a pitched battle that had frightened Anne even in the telling of it. When her eye traced, she still recalled, as if wounded herself, how she had exclaimed over it, pitied him for it, wished to care for it and him-- and how warmly he had responded to her sympathy. His hand, over hers, his eye, meeting hers--

But that, Anne knew, could never happen again. Now, when his bright proud eye fell on Anne, it fell on the top of her bowed head. She could not meet his eye; she could not bear it. She could not withstand looking at his eyes, seeking the expression of warm, unguarded tenderness she had known-- looking for-- _everything_!-- and seeing-- nothing. 


End file.
